AMY Review
AMY Review
By Anthony Fitchett
It’s scary that this actually got a release.
Survival Horror: A genre that invokes feelings of dread and nervous sweating before I even start to play. Just the idea of playing a game which is designed to scare me, usually at night in the dark, is one that makes me hesitate and look for something else to play.
There are, however, certain games that need to be played, need to be experienced, if only because I feel I owe it to the game designers to experience their vision.
Capcom and Konami hold a place in most people’s hearts when it comes to survival horror. Resident Evil and Silent Hill are the traditional yard sticks that this genre is measured against. But recently other entries in the genre have drawn attention and expanded our expectations: Dead Space, Left for Dead, and indeed Resident Evil 4 onwards have made the survival horror more of an extension of the action genre than one that stands alone.
But there are times where the survival horror’s origins, one of exploration, nervously walking around corners knowing that if anything appears you will have no option but to run, rears it’s pyramidal head and tries to scare the pants off us.
With this in mind I give you AMY, a survival horror game released on Xbox Live Arcade. It has recently been suggested that the triple-A full-boxed title is in trouble, with download titles proving to be as good as boxed products but at a fraction of the £39.99 retail price. AMY provides a good example of just how safe the triple-A titles really are. I’ll admit that on this occasion that I have not, as I’m sure others out there have not, actually finished AMY. This is not because it is too frightening, although it is scary that this actually got a release. It’s because it’s a nightmare. Let me explain.
AMY plays, nay even starts, like a checklist of survival horror. Haunting piano theme: check. Blood cells on the title screen: check. Grey, dark, haunted characters: check. Troubled females in a desperate situation: check.
The opening cinematic and gameplay is enough to tell you all you need to know about this game. Character graphics that look like someone tried to copy the style of Silent Hill 2, with dirty greys and browns, low resolution textures and unconvincing movement animations. This combined with a script that from the off makes you cringe and voice acting that only just moves past the quality of a primary school nativity play. It’s a very disappointing start.
The character you control is a young lady by the name of Lana, who as the game starts is escorting an autistic little girl, the game’s Amy, away from a ‘centre’ where some new doctors are trying to help her overcome her autism (all this is implied with a short telephone call during the opening cinematic). The cinematic ends with the train you were travelling on crashing, presumably into a station, but nothing is really explained very well. Your character awakens and your control of Lana starts, and here it only gets worse.
Controls are fiddly and very dated. Pushing forward to walk and pushing left and right to turn shouldn’t feel as wrong as it does in this game, but the character seems to be anchored to the ground so that she rotates bodily rather than turns. Action controls, picking up items, climbing ledges, opening doors, etc., are all carried out with the A button. Again, in typical checklist fashion, pressing A to climb up a ledge or up a ladder makes the game move to an external camera while playing the standard animation for the task, one that takes place at such a slow rate that you begin to dread climbing ladders or ledges simply for the amount of time it’s going to take.
As mentioned earlier, AMY seems to want to replicate the feel of Silent Hill 2, an admirable objective, but one that the developers haven’t managed. Instead of shambling faceless freaks, as in Silent Hill, the developers at Vector Cell have used a zombielike ‘infected’ creature set (shambling infected zombies: check). Combat is carried out using the one weapon in the game, a stick (again a throwback to Silent Hill 2, I feel), and single button presses on X. The first Infected shambles towards you and dies with an unconvincing bubble effect from a single hit with the stick. I understand that the first Infected is simply there to help you train in the actions needed to fight, but one hit still seems a bit lame. The next set of Infected you encounter don’t need a whole lot more to help kill them, although the number of hits is slowly increased to that which I felt should have been the starting point.
And they are the only thing you can hit. Boxes, windows (unless they’re intended for you to break them, more on that later), and any other detritus around the level, can be swung through as if they don’t exist. A simple bounce off animation would have been satisfactory, but in this day and age a full physics reaction should be standard. When you swing a stick at a cardboard box nowadays you expect it to fly across the level with a satisfying tumble, not simply fail to exist.
Weapons degrade over time, or rather through use, so this is maybe the reason that Vector Cell decided to not allow you to hit everything in the level, but it feels wrong. It should be the players choice to wear out all their weapons. If they die as a result they then know not to waste weapons when starting again.
It’s not long before you meet another person, a non-infected called Morcello. Cello to his friends ‘like the big Violin’ is his description, an example of the amazing script! Cello is a cab driver who is basically a training aid and a way to try and explain the reasons why you will encounter armed military types who will not hesitate to shoot you on sight. He helps you to find Amy, who after the crash has disappeared. This takes all of five to ten minutes of gameplay, after the obligatory fetch quest searching for DNA in corpses and blood puddles using a piece of technology that he supplies to you that just happens to be an exact fit to the scanners in the station.
Cello himself has been attacked by a – presumably – infected customer of his and walks about holding his stomach as if his guts will spill out. That said, from the way he walks I’d say his guts have already been evacuated; clearly into his trousers. The man’s animation is so strange that upon walking into the room to see me playing the game, my wife’s first statement was “has he shat himself?”. Not a great first impression there, Cello.
Cello guides you to try all the basics that the game will have to offer of the following chapters, pushing Amy into vent ducts so that she can help Lana progress by pressing a button, even though the hole you pushed her through was so large that Lana, or even fat Cello, could fit through and have done it themselves.
There are several places where doors need to be hacked to open them, but rather than giving the player a nice little minigame Vector Cell resorted to making you put Amy on the computer and stand waiting for her to beat the code and open the door. A wasted opportunity to add a little interest to a game that, even after the first level, had me not wanting to play any further.
You can probably tell that I’m not really impressed with AMY. The following levels open up new abilities for Amy. There are strange symbols daubed on walls that, when Amy notes down on her tablet-like device, suddenly teach her new skills, like the ability to create a sound bubble where all noise within is silenced.
This is where the breaking of windows that I mentioned earlier comes in. Until now you couldn’t break windows, but suddenly as a puzzle needs you to, using the silence bubble, you can. The problem lies in the environment having been fixed up to now and as such it’s not an obvious option. To be honest, you don’t even think it is an option. Having spent half an hour trying to use the silence bubble on an enemy, a large brute that batters and kills you with one swing (not an infected as you’d seen before, just a different lump of muscle that appears without explanation), a frustrated swing of my stick inadvertently smashed the window. It then became apparent that, in this place only, the window was supposed to be broken.
Inconsistencies plague this game. Early on Cello tells you that all doors have been locked by the military, only for him to unlock a door five minutes later telling you that nothing can stop his key!
Sets of rules are usually used to guide the player to acceptable conclusions and solutions. To provide, like the rules of our world do, an understanding for what is and what isn’t possible. To change them as you feel necessary, to make something previously impossible suddenly possible just to create a puzzle, makes no sense.
That, I’m afraid, describes AMY to a T: a game that Vector Cell made up on the fly.
“Shall we do this now?” it seems one developer must have said to another, who must have replied “Yeah, that was a great bit in Silent Hill 2!” or whatever game they were trying to simulate that minute.
It’s a mess. A game with a decent pedigree, headed up by Paul Cuisset – the man behind ‘Flashback’ and it’s sequel ‘Fade to Black’ that, if I’m honest, is a much better game than AMY but has so many similarities that it’s as if he hasn’t learned a single thing since 1995. Because of this I can only say that if AMY had been released in 1996, it would have already seemed outdated.
It’s such a shame. Paul Cuisset, like Eric Chahi with his wonderful ‘Another World’, are designers whose games I played and played as a child, and the mere mention of their names connected to a new release filled me with joy. Chahi’s ‘From Dust’, although interesting, left me cold, and AMY has left me sub-zero. It appears, like all things, you can’t return to the things of your childhood.
I would have loved to have said that AMY was a triumph. I wanted to say it. In fact I started the draft of this review with that in mind, but the more I played it the more my rose tinted glasses were lifted and the grey, drab, jerky, inconsistent, badly textured, glitchy truth shone through.
Overall: 2/10
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Developer: Vector Cell
Publisher: Lexis Numerique
Players: 1
Release: 11th January, 2012
Initial Price: 800 Microsoft points
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